Historyhttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/98842024-03-28T20:30:15Z2024-03-28T20:30:15ZStalin’s Last Comrade: Hanna Wolf and the “Karl Marx” Party College in the German Democratic RepublicMcKay, Jenniferhttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/203262024-02-01T03:31:05Z2024-01-31T00:00:00ZStalin’s Last Comrade: Hanna Wolf and the “Karl Marx” Party College in the German Democratic Republic
McKay, Jennifer
For over thirty years, the Parteihochschule Karl Marx (PHS) was under the direction of the fervent Hanna Wolf, who oversaw the training of East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party (SED) functionaries. First appointed as Director in 1950, Wolf proved to be a tenacious and calculated leader who was not only able to remain in her position for over three decades, but who also wielded power as a female member of the SED. While many high-ranking women in the East German regime were either propped up due to the influence of a more powerful partner or their positions were deemed more suitable to women’s work, Wolf’s appointment at the PHS proved neither and she broke through the male-dominated party culture of the SED on her own merits. However, scholarship focusing on high-ranking women in the SED has been quite meagre and on the PHS itself, there is a modest but important literature. Therefore, this dissertation explores how Wolf’s political savviness, which included a myriad of personality traits, helped her successfully navigate the male dominated party culture of the SED.
Such personality traits included being an “iron maiden,” proving to be cold and domineering with students and peers who did not follow the party line, or warm and friendly with those in positions of power. As a result of Wolf’s keen awareness of party politics, she was able to remain in her role as Director for thirty-three years, overseeing the training of close to 25,000 party functionaries that were sent out into the workforce and branches of the party apparatus armed with a very limited set of professional skills and only the knowledge of Marxism-Leninism, which ultimately helped stall technological advancements in the East German regime.
Often referred to as “Wolf Canyon” or the “Red Monastery,” Wolf ruled over the PHS with an “iron fist” and proved to be a massive barrier when it came to changing the student curricula. As a veteran communist who first joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1930, then spent the 1930s and 1940s in the Soviet Union, Wolf was instilled with a vehement dedication to Stalinism which never faltered throughout the duration of her life and which she employed in her management of the PHS. Even during the 1950s, with Stalin’s death in 1953 and Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of the Soviet dictator in 1956, Wolf stayed true to her ideals and faced backlash from colleagues at the party school who started a campaign for her removal. During the 1960s, Wolf had to contend with Walter Ulbricht’s transition from an ideologue to a technocrat and his attempts to reform PHS student coursework from focusing primarily on ideology to more technical topics. However, by the 1970s, Wolf’s leadership remained unchallenged as Erich Honecker, who was also a dedicated hardliner, replaced Ulbricht as Party General Secretary in 1971, and the PHS continued to operate under Wolf’s dogmatic and dictatorial rule until her retirement in June 1983.
2024-01-31T00:00:00ZIn Protection of No Woman: Consent, Illegitimacy, and Gender-Based Violence in Early Modern Somerset, 1600-1699MacAlpine, Rebecca-Ann Prestonhttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/203122024-01-30T03:31:07Z2024-01-29T00:00:00ZIn Protection of No Woman: Consent, Illegitimacy, and Gender-Based Violence in Early Modern Somerset, 1600-1699
MacAlpine, Rebecca-Ann Preston
Over the course of the seventeenth century, 1298 women came before the Quarter Sessions to secure financial resources for the upkeep of their unborn children. These interactions with the legal system highlight the ways in which female experience did not always translate into the adjudication of their cases. The preoccupation of the court, which was to shift financial support away from the parish to the putative father, highlights that the lived experiences of women were secondary to the primary economic objective. The inability to fully engage with these experiences and adjudicate accordingly demonstrates the violating nature of these proceedings. Who did the court intend to protect through bastardy proceedings, and what was the marginalizing impact of these decisions?
This dissertation explores the marginalizing processes embedded in the Quarter Session records of bastardy. Through the employment of a mixed methodological approach that engages both qualitative and quantitative strategies, this work shows that the Sessions were designed and implemented in a way that continued to marginalize unwed mothers for their failure to conform to socially accepted courting rituals. It also failed to account for the varied lived experiences of these women. As a result, the entire adjudicating process perpetuated institutionalized gender-based violence. The system was designed to not protect the well-being of mothers and their illegitimate children, but rather to protect the financial interests of the community at large, and reinforce gendered cultural expectations through a public shaming process. As a result, the processes ensured that women’s voices were present but silenced through the procedural mechanisms enacted in the Sessions and institutionalized gender-based violence enacted against unwed mothers in Somerset.
2024-01-29T00:00:00ZPractical Inclusion: Representing French-Canadians in the Army during the Second World Ward'Eon, Ryanhttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/203032024-01-27T03:31:16Z2024-01-26T00:00:00ZPractical Inclusion: Representing French-Canadians in the Army during the Second World War
d'Eon, Ryan
This dissertation offers a thorough re-examination of the process and reasons for why French-Canadian representation in the Canadian Army increased during the Second World War. It argues that the army’s leadership endeavoured to increase French-Canadian representation because of a shortage of recruits for the expanding army to combat the growing Axis threat and to avoid conscription for overseas service. The Goforth Report in 1941 proposed solutions to increase representation and by 1942-1943, the number of French-speaking units, officers, French language manuals, French language training camps, trades, and advanced training centres increased considerably. During the 1944 reinforcement crisis, senior officers exhausted efforts to maintain Francophone army representation within the four French-speaking battalions prior to sending conscripts overseas. This thesis also argues that French-Canadians, especially when compared to those who joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), made an even more significant contribution to the strength of the wartime Canadian Army.
Other studies in this thesis further explore the French-Canadian army experience. An examination of the Parliamentary debates and the Francophone press shows that most Francophone Members of Parliament (MPs) did not want to participate in another global war while the stance of the French language press was more complex. A random sample of courts martials of both French and English-speaking soldiers shows that the most common crimes were absence without leave (AWL) and desertion. Francophones faced harsher punishments as they were charged and convicted slightly more often of AWL and desertion and spent more time incarcerated for these two crimes. Both language groups also had significant differences to explain their offences. Finally, a study of Francophone soldiers and their Catholic faith shows that Catholicism both sustained and undermined French Canada’s relationship with the army.
2024-01-26T00:00:00ZLetters from the Boiler House: Conflict and Communication in a Second World War Canadian Internment CampWagenaar, Gillianhttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/200752023-10-31T02:31:01Z2023-10-30T00:00:00ZLetters from the Boiler House: Conflict and Communication in a Second World War Canadian Internment Camp
Wagenaar, Gillian
In March of 1941, two members of the Veterans Guard of Canada were court martialled for conduct “to the prejudice of good order and Military Discipline.” Their crime: passing letters, “illicit correspondence,” between a small group of “enemy alien” internees, known as the Musketeers, in an internment camp in rural Quebec, and a teenage girl named Winkie in Montreal.
The case of Winkie Henson and the Musketeers shows the Canadian internment camp during the Second World War to be a complex, often liminal, space of connection and conflict. It illuminates the tension inherent between official regulation and human action, pitting the needs of civilians, Canadian or otherwise, against governing powers. It highlights the role of correspondence in a pre-internet world and shows how relationships could begin and end by pen and paper. In later reflections and representations of the case, it also shows the selective nature of memory and how our relationship with the past is shaped by both time and emotion. Most importantly, the story of illicit correspondence presents the internment camp and, more widely, the Canadian home front, as a space in which strict social boundaries became fluid and malleable in a wartime context, to both the benefit and cost of young romantic prospects, hopeful fathers, social elites, and supposed “enemy aliens.” In this, the case, told as a microhistory, adds further complexity to the view of Canadian internment camps as simultaneous spaces of oppression and opportunity for those within and beyond their barbed wire bounds.
2023-10-30T00:00:00Z